A. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to a single pass, multiplied resolution scanner having a scanning width of W, in which two carriages are mounted in a flatbed housing, with one carriage supporting at least one mirror oriented at 45° from the longitudinal axis of the scanner, and with the other carriage supporting a linear sensor, such as a charge-coupled device (CCD) having a “n” pixel elements, and a reduction lens assembly that can resolve 2n/W in both the longitudinal (length) and transverse (width) directions by alternating the stepping of the two carriages only in the longitudinal direction in W/2n increments to shift the object image on the CCD by one-half the CCD pixel element's center to center distance in both the longitudinal and transverse directions.
B. Description of the Prior Art
Flatbed scanners and techniques for increasing the resolution for such scanners are known. However, known resolution increase techniques require multiple passes of the scanner head over the entire image and require computer-implemented software to stitch together scanned images of parts of a given scan line scanned during different scan passes.